Museum restores historic building
The roundhouse which used to stand in the cattle market has been restored and rebuilt and is now at the Museum of East Anglian Life. People involved in the project.
AN ICONIC building which stood on the cattle market in Bury St Edmunds from 1864 until 2006 has been lovingly restored and re-erected in Stowmarket.
The octangonal wooden structure, known as the roundhouse, was used as a payments office for the market and to sell refreshments after the market closed.
But it was dismantled when construction work started on the arc development and put into storage until the Bury Society and St Edmundsbury Borough Council could agree on a suitable new site for it.
From today, visitors to the Museum of East Anglian Life can see it restored to its former glory, among other buildings representing the region’s social and farming history, as well as its industrial and agricultural history, all restored as part of a £3 million project, with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant.
Museum director Tony Butler said: “It’s a really symbolic building where town and country meet. You enter through a supermarket car park and within two minutes you’re at a field looking over open country.”
Cllr John Griffiths, leader of St Edmundsbury Borough Council, said: “The reconstruction is an absolute triumph and the roundhouse looks once again as it did in the early drawings and photographs.”
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Weather for Bury St Edmunds
Wednesday 19 June 2013
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 13 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: North
Tomorrow
Light showers
Temperature: 12 C to 18 C
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